


Spring Cleaning

by levendis



Series: Prompt Fics [41]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Light Angst, Memory Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2015-12-18
Packaged: 2018-05-07 09:46:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5452247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levendis/pseuds/levendis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The box of annoying things. Post-"Hell Bent"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spring Cleaning

**Author's Note:**

> for longjackets/jontinf on the AO3, who requested: 12 and Clara and the box of annoying things.

This is not the universe’s most complicated mystery. There are plenty of clues, and the Doctor is not an idiot. Well, he is an idiot, but he’s not _that_ sort of idiot. To be honest it wouldn’t require genius to piece this together. What he lost has left a very specific outline. He could fill in the blanks without breaking a mental sweat, that isn’t the hard part about this at all. The hard part is not doing it.

There’d been an attempt to clean up, he can tell. Things had been taken, fingerprints hastily smudged, a command given to the TARDIS (which the ship had half-understood, and then half-carried out) to wipe databanks, remove evidence. But there is still - there are things, lying about.

He grabs the nearest container not totally filled to the brim - an odd, aching deja-vu as he tosses out the flugelhorn, the Big Mouth Billy singing bass, the flyer for a furniture sale with misused apostrophes, the hotel front-desk bell. He takes a shaky breath. Space for the even-more-annoying things made, he sets to work.

(‘Annoying’ isn’t the right word but he doesn’t know what the right word is and that tip-of-the-tongue frustration is annoying in and of itself, so close enough. Besides, he’s alone now, and there’s no one to complain about his filing system.)

In the console room, he finds and swiftly chucks into the bin:

  * Three hair ties, tangled with strands of hair, which he does not scan or hold for too long
  * Five bobby pins, two of which are bent purposefully out of shape
  * A sheet of stickers, smiley-faces, _Good Job!_
  * _Sense and Sensibility_ , first edition, signed with a note he does not pause to read
  * A Polaroid - his brain twitches, blurs, at the face he will have to forget again and again and again and
  * Other things. Other things? He stops paying attention after a while.



Satisfied, or as satisfied as he assumes he’ll ever be about anything to do with whatever this is, he puts the lid on the bin and then puts the bin into the hole he finds behind a roundel and he watches it slide away to wherever the TARDIS has decided to take it. 

 

Something is itching in his brain, a splinter buried too deep to dig out. He can ignore it, he will. He has their story, that has to be enough. What memories he keeps are gifts; he knows more than he should, than he imagines he’d ever expected. He knows where they’d been. What they’d done. Oh, what they’d done. She’d held his hand and his hearts and she’d. His knees buckle, something unnameable crushing down on him. He clings to the railing, and his ship clings back, and he’d cry if he could. Remembering, very nearly, what it had felt like to be touched.

Remembering what it felt like to fuck up so horribly that the only way out was to end what he thinks might have been one of the best things that had ever happened to him. He’d made a choice - no, _they’d_ made a choice, remember that if you forget all else - they had chosen this in good faith, and he will respect that decision. He has to.

Travel through time all you want, the only way you can ever go is forward.

He jettisons the bedroom. He’ll get a new one. Or maybe not, just pass out on floors and couches and uncomfortable chairs. Jettisons half of everything else, picking things at random, acres of space winking out of existence. His ship, bless her, doesn’t even flinch as he whittles her down. Essentials, basics. Cruft cut away. He is the Doctor and this is his TARDIS and all he has to do now is.

All he has to do now is be himself. All he has to do is keep moving. And he will, he will. He will live up to the name he’d struggled with for so long. Clara wouldn’t have accepted anything else, he knows that much.


End file.
